This new edition brings together selected chapters from Volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Japan underwent momentous changes during the nineteenth century. This book chronicles the transition from Tokugawa rule, and the political process that finally ended centuries of warrior rule. It goes on to discuss the samurai rebellions against the Meiji Restoration, national movements for constitutional government that indirectly resulted in the Meiji Constitution of 1889, and Japan's twentieth-century drive to Great Power status.

"...offers an incisive analysis of the immutable realtionship between foreign relations and domestic politics which transformed Japan from a modern nation state to an imperialist power between 1868 and 1912." Mark Lincicome, Journal of Asian History